Background and Relevant Art
There are a number of ways to distribute different types of resources (software, hardware, or combinations thereof) in a computerized environment. From a software standpoint, for example, an enterprise might install multiple copies of the operating system (or application program) on multiple different computers, and thereby distribute one copy among many systems. Along these lines, the enterprise may also need to install several additional software updates to the copied or shared operating system, and thus also share multiple copies of these updates among the many systems. Conventional ways of sharing hardware include setting up computer systems on a network so that multiple different computer systems can access another computer's drive space for various storage or file sharing needs.
Additional ways of distributing resources from a combined software and hardware standpoint include creating unique entities on a single physical computer system, where the entities behave as separate and independent computer systems, but share the same physical media and processing resources. For example, an enterprise might create multiple virtual machines on at the same single server, each of which can be separately addressed by another computer as if each given virtual machine were its own separate computer system. In one such implementation, one or few servers in a large enterprise can also host several virtual machines on the same set of hardware, where those virtual machines can each serve as additional servers, or network accessible personal computers, however configured.
One will understand that such entities as virtual machines combine the sharing of software and hardware resources since they are typically set up with an existing copy of an operating system used by another virtual machine, and since they may even share a drive that is already being used by the other virtual machine. Despite sharing the same operating system, however, the enterprise will need to customize aspects of the operating system so that the virtual machine is not confused with other virtual machines using the same copy of the operating system, particularly when installed on the same physical drive. To create a customized virtual machine, therefore, a system administrator will need to provide the new virtual machine with unique indicia that distinguishes it from other virtual machines (or other computer systems), such as machine name, time zone, domain name, company name, product keys, and the like.
Simply customizing the virtual machine, however, can be fairly difficult. For example, the system administrator may desire to simply install the virtual machine from a basic installation copy of an operating system, and then apply all the various software patches of interest, as well as unique virtual machine indicia. Of course, this can be fairly inconvenient if there are a large number of software patches and other unique customizations that the system administrator would like to apply. Thus, the system administrator may prefer to copy one instance of an operating system that has already been customized to the system administrator's preferences from a software standpoint, and then install that copy in the new virtual machine albeit with different unique indicia. As such, the system administrator will need to remove the custom indicia from the existing copy-of-interest before installing that copy in the new virtual machine.
Nevertheless, there are different difficulties with simply removing customized indicia from one operating system copy and then adding new customized indicia to the operating system copy on a new virtual machine. In particular, conventional preparation software that might be used to create a “generic” or “template” copy of an operating system (or application) can be difficult to use, and can take a significant amount of time. For example, a system administrator might need to start up a copy of the operating system of interest, and then run certain preparation software on top of the operating system while it is running. As the preparation software removes certain unique features of the operating system copy, the preparation software may require the operating system to reboot several times until all unique features have been removed.
Besides the difficulties inherent in continually restarting the operating system (or application) due to simple delay, conventional preparation software can also be technically complex and difficult to use. In particular, if a user fails to appropriately configure the preparation software before attempting to convert an operating system into a generic or template copy, the user may strip out items the user did not intend to strip. This could result in the user spending more time getting the operating system back to an appropriate point, or even rendering the given operating system-of-interest (or template thereof) inoperable.
Accordingly, there are a number of problems with creating new instances of entities using preexisting software that can be addressed.